Graham, Sylvester

American reformer
1794–1851

Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and reformer, is best known for
his creation of the Graham cracker. He also put forth the idea that
moderation is beneficial, and that certain foods and behaviors are
detrimental to both physical and spiritual health. It is not enough to
practice moderation in all things, he claimed, because some things are
simply not good, either for spiritual or physical reasons, or both. These
theories made Graham a central figure in the health reform movement of the
1800s.

Graham was born on July 5, 1794, in West Suffield, Connecticut. His
father, the clergyman John Graham, was seventy-two years of age at the
time of his birth. Within two years, his father was dead, and Graham was
raised by various relatives.

Graham worked as a farm-hand, clerk, and teacher before preparing for the
ministry. He married Sarah Earl in 1826. In 1830 he was made general agent
for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, and he began to study human
physiology
,
diet
, and regimen. He then launched himself on a lecture career that took him
up and down the Atlantic Coast.

He advocated bread at least twelve hours old, made of the whole of the
wheat, and coarsely ground. He also recommended hard mattresses, open
bedroom windows, cold shower baths, loose and light clothing, daily
exercise, vegetables and fruits, rough (whole-grain) cereals, pure
drinking water, and cheerfulness at meals. He taught that temperance
included both physical and moral reform.

In 1832, Graham edited Luigi Cornaro's
Discourse on a Sober and Temperate Life.
This discourse was translated into many languages and first published in
the United States in 1788, after which it went through at least twelve
editions. Cornaro wrote of three social evils: adulation and ceremony,
heresy, and intemperance. Intemperance was, to Cornaro, the principal
vice, and he wrote that a person should choose "to live in
accordance with the simplicity of nature, to be satisfied with very
little, to follow the ways of holy self-control and divine reason, and to
accustom himself to eat nothing but that which is necessary to sustain
life."

In 1837, Sylvester Graham wrote his
Treatise on Bread and Bread Making,
which advocated the use of Graham flour, made from coarsely ground
whole-wheat kernels, and instructed wives to bake their own bread. Perhaps
as a result of his impact on their business, which was reduced by the
making of homemade bread, he was attacked by a mob of bakers. Meanwhile,
Graham flour showed up in barrels and Graham boarding houses sprang up to
minister to the new demands.

Graham influenced others to take up the cause of health reform. John
Harvey Kellogg, while working as an apprentice typesetter, was exposed to
a compilation of articles on health, including Graham's
Health, or How to Live,
a series of six pamphlets published by the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
and he became intensely interested in Graham's dietetic and
sanitary reforms. In his spare moments Kellogg read all of Graham's
writings. Ralph Waldo Emerson made reference to Sylvester Graham as the
"poet of bran and pumpkins." Graham died in 1851.